The art of peeping: photography at the limits of privacy

“It’s just plain creepy!” “This guy should be arrested.” “He’s a peeping Tom with a camera”. “These people had an expectation of privacy in their own home that was invaded by the perv, I mean photographer.”

The indignation that has greeted Arne Svenson’s series of images, The Neighbors, on comment forums has been colourful and occasionally unrepeatable. The 60-year-old surreptitiously snapped residents in the glass-walled apartments opposite his own in Tribeca, New York, and, without seeking permission from his subjects, exhibited them in a nearby gallery. Using a 500mm lens, he peeked into the lives of others – like a real-life LB Jeffries from the film Rear Window – and obliterated the assumed divide between the public and the personal. Unsurprisingly, two of his neighbours sued, having spotted their children among the subjects. Yet a court ruled this month that Svenson’s actions were defensible under the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, and that such art needs no consent to be made or sold.

Svenson says the verdict was “a great victory for the rights of all artists” and, although he remains wary of discussing the project, stresses that his motivation was only to observe the nuances of human existence. “I find the unrehearsed, unconscious aspects of life the most beautiful to photograph, as they are most open to interpretation, to a narrative,” he explains. “A dramatic moment has the single power of action, but tiny, linked moments are how we mark time on this earth – I am much more interested in recording the breath between words than I am the actual words themselves.”

A resident holds a pair of scissors while undertaking an unknown task. Photograph: Arne Svenson (courtesy of Julie Saul Gallery)

Svenson’s images are not as sensational as they first seem. The identities of his neighbours, who are rendered with a soft, painterly effect, are obscured, and the choice of framing also leaves a sense of mystery. They are truthful, artistic representations of life which possess a subtle theatricality (a characteristic evident throughout his practice). That the chosen moments are so acutely observed makes them disturbing. Indeed, the mere sensation that we are being looked upon is, as Jean-Paul Sartre concluded, enough to haunt us.

The acclaimed photographer Michael Wolf, some of whose work is of a similar ilk to The Neighbors (especially Window Watching, in which he peeped into towerblock apartments in Hong Kong), acknowledged this when he expressed his own unease at the idea of being photographed if he was unaware: “I’m not sure how comfortable I would feel if I knew someone would come into my room while I was sleeping and take my picture. I think, spontaneously, I wouldn’t feel comfortable,” he said.

“I don’t photograph anything salacious or demeaning,” is Svenson’s stock retort when pressed on his work’s morality. “I am not photographing the residents as specific, identifiable individuals, but as representations of humankind.” Indeed, his work lacks the explicitness of Merry Alpern’s photographs of prostitutes (Dirty Windows) and the scopophilic drive of Miroslav Tichy’s homespun snaps of female bathers. But it is a selfish practice nonetheless.

A dog stands at the window of an apartment, looking outwards. Photograph: Arne Svenson (courtesy of Julie Saul Gallery)

Not all such photography has artistic intent; the current show at the Photographers’ Gallery in London unearths a curious social project, Mass Observation, which began in 1937 with the aim of creating an “anthropology of ourselves”. Using a team of field workers and many modes of surveillance – undercover photography, eavesdropping and stalking among them – Mass Observation sought to record and examine the intricacies of British life. Its remit included such bizarre topics as behaviour of people at war memorials, the gestures of motorists, bathroom behaviour and the private lives of midwives.

Humphrey Spender was Mass Observation’s principal photographer and made many of his images covertly in the streets of Bolton and Blackpool. Spender, like Svenson, considered that the honourable intent of the project justified the means. “I believed obsessively that truth would only be revealed when people were not aware of being photographed. I had to be invisible,” he said. The results of those early years of Mass Observation are fascinating and it is the attention to seemingly trivial detail that correlates with Svenson’s work. At times, both found beauty in the banality of everyday life.

Occasionally, the urge to pry becomes inverted and the snooper’s behaviour reveals something of their own psyche. Kohei Yoshiyuki was a voyeur of voyeurs who photographed people as they watched couples having sex in Tokyo parks (The Park), while Sophie Calle had herself tailed by a private detective (The Shadow) to scrutinise herself as she scrutinised others (Suite Vénitienne, Address Book and The Hotel). These surreal and intense encounters suggest the act is as compelling as the action.

Shizuka Yokomizo, meanwhile, made residents complicit in the exploitation of their own privacy by posting notes into strangers’ homes inviting them to appear at their front window for her to photograph (Stranger). And it is within the phrasing of Yokomizo’s request that we find a telling detail: “Dear Stranger, I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not know … I would like to take a photograph of you … If you do not want to get involved, please simply draw your curtains to show your refusal. I really hope to see you from the window.” At the heart of peeping is a desire to ‘see’ and to ‘know’ – a wish to connect with strangers, rather than just an inclination to intrude. In Svenson’s case, the connection was made in a thoughtful yet controversial way.

The art of peeping: photography at the limits of privacy